Fire in the Blood

by Perry O'Brien

  Coop’s fist throbbed in the silence. He reminded himself what Eva had told him, and of the drugs on the desk. Presser wouldn’t be calling the police. He let go of the shuddering panic, thoughts coming clear now. The doctor was his enemy, and he was helpless, and with this awareness came a renewed sense of control.

  First thing, Coop thought, was to make the situation secure. He knelt beside the doctor and rolled him over, facedown into the carpet.

  Presser groaned.

  “Sshh,” said Coop, and put a knee in his back.

  He snatched the pillow from the couch, tore off the pillowcase, and pulled this over the doctor’s head. He’d seen a phone on the desk. Coop yanked the cord from the wall and, folding Presser’s arms backward, flashlight in his mouth, began to lash the doctor’s wrists.

  “Fauh,” said Presser, beginning to wake up. “Fuck. Hey, no.” His voice rising in volume, too loud. Coop shifted his weight, used a boot to push aside one of Presser’s legs and drove a gloved fist into the doctor’s testicles.

  The yelling was instantly cut to a sharp exhale. Then Presser fell into a high-pitched, giggling whine, trying to fold his body like a stabbed caterpillar.

  “Sshh,” said Coop again.

  He finished securing the wrists. Presser continued to wriggle and sob but the volume stayed manageable. Now Coop went back to the filing cabinet. Locked. He took out the Strider and eased the titanium blade into the drawer’s lip, manipulating the knife until he found good leverage. He grasped the handle with both hands and leaned into it, extracting a metal squeal of resistance, until something snapped with a violent twang and the drawer came rolling free. Inside he saw endless rows of manila files.

  Coop realized he hadn’t brought a bag. There was a trashcan next to the desk. Coop dumped the contents on the floor but decided the plastic liner was too flimsy. Over his shoulder, he saw the doctor stirring. Coop looked again around the room, found a garment bag hanging behind the dry cleaning. He threw the suit inside onto the floor.

  Now Presser muttered under the hood.

  “Hey,” said the doctor. “Hey.”

  Coop didn’t respond.

  “Please, I wanna…Let’s have a conversation,” Presser said. “We can talk.”

  Coop kept working. The manila folders slid off one another, slippery between his gloves. Paperwork spilled everywhere within the bag, cascading and intermingled.

  “Look, tell them it’s fine,” Presser continued. “It’s not…It’s fine. Tell them I have it covered. Everything’s under control.”

  Coop stood over him, the open blade of the Strider in his fist. The doctor rolled his head back and forth, still mumbling. Blood had soaked through the pillowcase, a seeping flower of red, and Presser kept talking, his words becoming alien and shrill, unintelligible, pleading with the darkness as Coop left the lab and made his way toward the exit.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Kosta circled a heavy bag, his bare feet squeaking on the gym floor. He ducked and feinted, let off a blaze of right jabs, then dropped low again to rise with a vicious hook to the body. The bag shuddered with every punch, swinging on its chain. Kosta picked up the tempo, huffing and snorting. Cross to the body, hook to the head, another stiff gut shot, and Kosta pivoted away, imagining his opponent doubled and clutching a bruised liver. He chambered one fist for a quick, killing blow to the base of the skull.

  The timer buzzed and Kosta took a break from the drill, using both gloved paws to take a deep swig from his water bottle.

  He sat on the mat and let his heart rate settle. Nearby he could see Buqa working the kick cactus, a weird piece of equipment sprouting arms at multiple angles. He watched her move through squares of light flashing diagonally from the high slotted windows of the basement space. The fighting gym was almost empty this time of day. Over the last few years since he’d been coming here, more and more of the floor had been converted to padding, a symptom of the American infatuation with grappling. Popular thinking said boxers like himself were outdated, that real fights happened on the ground. There was some wisdom to this, of course. Guys lose control and try to tackle you, then you get all the rolling and humping on the floor, looking for a good submission hold. But real fights weren’t staged in an octagon. On the street you could pull someone down for a choke, only to have another guy come up and start stomping on your head. Or you wrap your legs around your opponent’s head, but he pulls a razor and gashes open your femoral artery. At his core, Kosta was uncomfortable with the very ideology of ground fighting, the inevitability of entanglement. No, he would keep practicing on his feet. Moving, striking, waiting for opportunities.

  Kosta pulled off his gloves and began to unwrap his hands. It felt good to be sweaty from hitting something. He’d been so nervous ever since he decided to make his play. To go behind Luzhim’s back.

  “Nobody gives you chances,” one of his favorite rappers said, “you gotta take ’em.” Kosta had repeated this to himself over the last few days while he made his plans, a mantra against the yellow spell of anxiety that seemed to hover around him. Kosta knew that Luzhim would see it as a great betrayal, if ever he found out, but he wasn’t sure what the old man would do.

  After all, it was Luzhim himself who first gave Kosta the idea to approach the Bellantes. After their phone call Kosta puzzled over the things Luzhim had told him. About the dead girl, and why Sean needed to die, and especially the part about the dead girl’s family. The Bellantes. “They’re like the Falconaras,” Luzhim had said. The Falconaras. It was a name from an older time, when Kosta had been a prisoner.

  Kosta was fifteen the first time the Communists had arrested him. They caught him trying to hijack gas cans from a state depot south of Lezhe, and sentenced him to work in a copper mine. He escaped just a month later, only to be recaptured, and for the next several years he was shuffled through a series of juvenile labor camps, a period of bureaucratic chaos he would later understand to be the Communists’ death rattle. When the government fell in 1994, Kosta was transferred to a small detention facility outside Saranda, on the Adriatic Coast.

  He preferred the labor camps, where at least they’d slept outdoors. He had grown up hunting in the shadow of snow-capped mountains, through forests of pine and cedar, but in Saranda he’d been locked in a tiny cement chamber with a single slotted window. Prisoners were allowed to bathe twice per week, and they shared a single shower room, which they also used to do laundry. During winter storms the whole prison descended into a bitter, salty chill, and there was nothing to do but slap-box, smoke, and mingle with other criminals. But then a new warden assumed control of the facility, and the prison acquired a television. The warden was a connoisseur of cowboy films, particularly those of Sergio Corbucci. Kosta’s favorite was Il Grande Silenzia. The snowy mountains of Utah reminded him of home.

  There was never news on the television, only cowboy movies, but always there were rumors. Despite talk of a rigged election, President Berisha had claimed a people’s mandate to transform the economy. With the support of Western countries and guidance from the IMF, Berisha threw open the gates of the formerly cloistered Albania, and soon there was a frenzy to participate in the free market. Kosta didn’t have money or property to invest, but he’d overheard urgent conversations in the prison, men telling their sons to sell the tractor, sell the house, slaughter the animals—anything to free up cash. The warden talked openly and excitedly about the promised return rates, the long lines of people waiting to invest their money, and the cottage he was eyeing, in Calitri, where in a few years he hoped to retire.

  One day in January the guards came swarming into the prison, openly brandishing their AKM rifles. They were led by the warden, who yelled and waved a red national flag, and as Kosta watched in disbelief he began to unlock the cells. The old-timers were skeptical. One man screamed “Don’t let them take you” and held fast to the bars. Having been imprisoned un
der the Communists, he thought it was a ruse, that the guards had come to execute them. But soon Kosta and the others were made to understand the situation: Albania was in revolt. In just a few months the pyramid schemes had crumbled, leaving a sinkhole that swallowed the country’s savings, and under advisement from the International Monetary Fund, President Berisha had declared there would be no compensation for the schemes’ victims. After all, he said, the blame ultimately fell on those who had made poor investments.

  Outside the prison they found Saranda overthrown. Police stations and military barracks had been raided for arms and equipment, and the streets were barricaded with overturned oil barrels. A temporary council of gangsters was formed, and Kosta was selected to lead a team of fellow teenage rebelimi on daily patrols. In place of a cell, Kosta took up residence in the empty summer home of a Greek family. The cottage was made of stone, with a small garden and red-tiled roof. When he wasn’t on patrol, Kosta sat in the terraced front yard. The rebels had captured a Soviet T-72 battle tank from a nearby armory, and Kosta would sit in his garden as the sun set, smoking cigarettes and drinking bottles of commandeered wine, watching as the tank rolled up and down the beach.

  By May the revolution was defeated. Italian troops led a UN mission to stomp the uprising and install an interim government. There were demonstrations and riots, rounds of negotiations that led to a referendum, which was then followed by more rioting. By this time Kosta was on his way north, back to the mountains, following a crew of rebelimi who had connections to a gun smuggling operation.

  It was around this time that Kosta remembered first hearing about the Falconaras. There were three of them, brothers, and together they had managed one of the largest and most disastrous of the pyramid schemes. During the course of the new government’s investigation, evidence began to surface that the Falconaras weren’t just a trio of grifters, as had been assumed, but were in fact financial operatives working on behalf of the Italian Mafia. Some even suggested the entire financial crisis had stemmed from this money laundering operation, which had inspired imitator schemes and subsequently triggered a delirium of competition. Though they were never charged, the name Falconara became representative of the whole deceit, the fly trap of capitalism, and for a while it entered the local jargon as a pejorative for greed.

  “Don’t Falconara all the sausages,” a fellow smuggler would say to Kosta over the fire pit as they trucked a shipment of FN SCARS into Montenegro.

  And it was this sense that Luzhim must have intended when talking about the dead girl’s family, Kosta felt sure. The Bellantes were bankers—“and not just bankers,” Luzhim had said—leading Kosta to assume they were somehow connected to the underbelly.

  But the name triggered another memory for Kosta. The reason the brothers were never charged. Despite endless interrogations and debriefings and international pressure, despite death threats and raging mobs, the Falconaras never gave evidence against one another. Even though the whole country knew what they had done, each of them refused to indict his brothers. It was a strategy that had led them to prevail under the law, and eventually in the public eye, as this fanatic loyalty suggested a supreme Albanianness. Something Luzhim would never understand. He saw love of kin as a corrupt kind of sentimentality, whereas in Kosta’s homeland, family was all.

  For instance: Once during the months of the Uprising, Kosta’s patrol had captured two Serbians, a husband and wife trying to flee from Durres. The couple had acquired a small cabin boat but been chased back from the maritime border by Greek helicopters. Then they’d run out of gas and become shipwrecked.

  When the couple had finished telling their story, Kosta drew one of his Tokarevs and shot the husband in the throat. They shaved the woman’s head, hung a heavy Orthodox icon around her neck, and chased her naked down the beach, whipping her body with steel antennas taken from abandoned cars. Finally the woman ran screaming into the surf and Kosta followed. When she fell, he pounced into the waves and held her down in the roiling saltwater. He was twenty-two years old, and it was the first time he had ever been with a woman.

  Why did he do this? Because Kosta’s grandparents had originally come from Kosova, and his mother had told him stories about their treatment at the hands of the Serbs. And even though Kosta had run away when he was fifteen, had abandoned his mother and their tiny mountain village, he knew that he lived under certain obligations, debts acquired before his birth. He and the Serbs were in blood, because of what their people had done to each other.

  This was the thing Luzhim couldn’t appreciate, being a Communist fuck first and an Albanian second. He didn’t understand the power of ancestral law, the Tree of Blood. What Kosta knew, what had inspired him to go against Luzhim’s wishes and approach the Bellantes, was this: True clans will do anything to avenge their family.

  So instead of killing Sean, as Luzhim had ordered him to do, Kosta had kept him a prisoner. Then he sent Zameer to the dead girl’s funeral, with a letter for her family: I have the man who killed your daughter, and I will deliver him to you. For a price. A ransom big enough for Kosta to finally get himself free of his debts to Luzhim. Enough to go out on his own, build up his own crew, chase down his destiny. And yes, Luzhim would be murderous with rage when he found out what Kosta had done, but what could the old man do?

  Balkan rave music came from the phone inside Kosta’s gym bag. Kosta used his teeth to unstrap a glove so he could pull out the phone: incoming call from Presser. He paused before answering. It was a thing undealt with. The doctor ran a rehab clinic but had a habit himself. In exchange for product, Presser gave Kosta access to cheap methadone and other pharmaceuticals, not to mention a revolving customer base. But it was also the place where the Bellante girl had worked. Presser shouldn’t have any way of knowing Kosta had been involved in her death.

  But here he was, calling.

  Kosta answered and right away he could tell the doctor was just resurfacing after a long nod: his voice dull and distant, stoned, but edged with panic. Something about his lab getting “invaded.” Kosta closed the phone and wiped sweat from his forehead. He whistled to Buqa.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Coop tracked the progress of a black squirrel as it dashed across a telephone wire. Everything was gray and quiet outside the hotel, a silent film except for the acrobatics of this weird scrabbling creature. Coop hadn’t realized squirrels came in black, and he wondered if they might be bad luck.

  A hiss came from the coffee pot. Instead of pouring himself a cup, Coop emptied the urn back into the feed tank, reloaded the filter, and set the pot to run a second time, using the fresh coffee in place of water. Battery acid, Anaya called this concentrated brew. The coffeemaker chugged through its second cycle, occasionally spitting drops of black sludge against the pot.

  All night Coop had scoured the files, going without sleep and still only making it halfway through the stack. Each file contained pages and pages of personal histories, medical evaluations, treatment plans, notes from counselors and transcripts from support groups, most of it rendered in a cryptographic salad of medical jargon: acculturation, cross-tolerance, enmeshment, psychopharmacological intervention, ACT and PAWS and CBT. But some words Coop knew: hallucination, relapse, remission, and, of course, heroin.

  Heroin, heroin, heroin.

  With his coffee, Coop came back to the window. Cold air was breathing through the glass but Coop hardly noticed. In the last few hours his adrenaline had sputtered out, replaced by an intestinal anxiety, something releasing drops of molten worry into the cavities of his body.

  He thought about Dr. Presser again, bloody on the floor.

  Coop didn’t believe himself to be a man who enjoyed hurting people. It was true that he was proud of his earned proficiency with violence, but in his mind there was a vast and crucial distance separating those who were capable of fighting, should the need arise, and the crazy folks always looking for the
next throw-down.

  The squirrel was still balanced on the frozen wire. In the wobble Coop felt a haunted kind of unease, an itchiness of ghost-fire and hissing snakes, a nauseous tug in the direction of October.

  He wouldn’t think about that, he decided.

  There was something in front of him. Some mystery in the interplay between Presser, Theo, the stranger at the funeral. It reminded him of his time downrange, where through the sandstorm of mission briefings, news reports, and ancient tribal rivalries he would intermittently perceive the barest outline of coherence, a sense there was some structure of meaning hidden just beyond his sight.

  Coop went back to the files. He lifted one of the patient records, Nolan Hernandez—gaunt, dark-skinned, his lips drawn back like a wolf—and skimmed the notes. “Client has become agitated and hostile following surgical amputation of left leg; describes violent sexual fantasies, often involving staff.” Keeping his eyes on the photo, Coop transferred Nolan to a stack on the nightstand. Next came Diamond, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three. “Client brags about hitting elderly grandfather with a phonebook.” Stack. A growing pile, the violent and possibly guilty. Eva had shared her theory that Kay was killed by one of the addicts she was treating. This made sense to Coop. It explained why Dr. Presser had taken Kay’s paperwork from Next Start and hidden the files in his personal office. He had known that some of the clinic’s patients were unstable, but instead of reporting them, Presser had kept sending Kay and the other caseworkers to meet with these violent, deranged junkies. The kind of people who would run a woman down and leave her to die in the snow.

  Coop closed his eyes for a moment. He hadn’t slept in days and he knew his time in America was running out. What he wanted to do was tear through the folders and find his enemy. But he needed to be deliberate about this. Slow is smooth, he heard Anaya say. And smooth is fast.